{"id":3741,"date":"2008-10-09T10:01:11","date_gmt":"2008-10-09T10:01:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2008\/10\/more-on-munanga-john-avery\/"},"modified":"2011-02-05T07:46:50","modified_gmt":"2011-02-05T07:46:50","slug":"more-on-munanga-john-avery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/2008\/10\/more-on-munanga-john-avery\/","title":{"rendered":"More on munanga<\/em> – John Avery"},"content":{"rendered":"

[from John Avery<\/em>]
\nIt’s inevitably guesswork, but I reckon munanga<\/a><\/i> is one of those spirit-connected words – not far off devil or ghost. It is used widely in the central NT Gulf of Carpentaria and Tablelands.
\nAnother word for white people is mandaji<\/i> – the feminine is mandanga<\/i>. You can hear these words at Elliott, especially from Gudanji, Wambaya or Nanka (Ngarnji). Aji\/anga<\/i> (also f. -ana<\/i>) are personal suffixes. So -anga<\/i> also could be a personal suffix attached to mun-.<\/i>
\nMun<\/i> by itself means to curse or place a deadly curse on someone. The usual motive is jealousy. For example, a long time ago a devil from Manda waterhole on Beetaloo went up to Tanumbrini station which was the home of another devil. The Manda traveller was turfed out by the Tanumbrini devil who was jealous for the country. The Tanumbrini bloke ‘bin mun’ the Munda fella, so old Tanumbrini station is called Mun-min. The mun<\/i> bit is more like muyin<\/i> in Muyinmin, but by itself my informants say mun<\/em> (i.e. shortway).<\/p>\n


\nAt Numbulwar in recent times anybody at all might ‘madj’ the local shop, placing a ‘curse’ on it and requiring it to be shut down until the curse was lifted. The usual pattern was to say ‘I madj this shop from my mother’, i.e. because of who my mother is and her sacred totems etc. It is like a jungkayi<\/i> looking after his mother’s stuff. My informants (Alawa, Mara, Jingili mainly) said this was wrong. They thought madj<\/i> was the same as mun<\/em>. They said it was okay to mun<\/i> something small, like a pipe or tobacco, but not a big thing like a shop. This is because mun<\/i> is cursing to death, and the target of the mun<\/i> could turn around and kill you if the thing was too big and he could not pay.
\nSo I reckon there could be something in a connection between mun<\/i> and munanga<\/i> in all of this. If it involved suffixing like mandaji\/mandanga<\/i>, it might have borrowed the feminine suffix. If so, this could have made the word a little more formal and polite.
\nI think many informants would say munanga<\/i> meant devil because whitefellas are devils anyway. Yanyuwa and Garrwa people didn’t use munanga<\/i> much. White people were ngabaya<\/i> – which is their common word for devil or ghost. Ngabaya <\/em>is pretty rough talk. Munanga<\/em> is a little more respectful.
\nI associate munanga<\/i> with Mara and Alawa people mainly, including Wandarang and at least some of the Numburindi people south of Yolngu country on the Gulf. These people are collectively known as Marinabala – they have ‘one body secret way’.
\nAt a stretch, maybe munanga<\/i> meant ‘the jealous ones’ or ‘the ones of whom we are jealous’ or ‘jealousy mob’.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[from John Avery] It’s inevitably guesswork, but I reckon munanga is one of those spirit-connected words – not far off devil or ghost. It is used widely in the central NT Gulf of Carpentaria and Tablelands. Another word for white people is mandaji – the feminine is mandanga. You can hear these words at Elliott, … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3741","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3741","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3741"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3741\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4262,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3741\/revisions\/4262"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3741"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3741"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.paradisec.org.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3741"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}